Any fellas out there that know their way with electronics?

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So help me out will ya?

Here’s the story, I was playing nice and comfy the other day and after half a day of racing my controller, an XBox One one, connected via USB, just suddenly stopped working, and overheating, for those who know it or have one, it got hot in a spot slightly above that port at the bottom of it where you plug the keyboard.

So I did what any sensible person would do, and took it apart to poke at it, don’t worry, I’m fairly good with electronics, anyway, I managed to find the culprit…sss

Given the size of these parts is quite hard for me to pinpoint with my finger which one of these f$%&ers is causing problems, the two fellas down there are capacitors which are the ones I feel heating up(the bottom one more than the other), which would be the usual culprits, but the big arrow there points to an IC that shows signs of melted plastic, and in fact the internal frame has a nasty(by its size) melted spot that kinda fits that part.

IMG_20181006_221041%20-%20copia
IMG_20181006_221041%20-%20copia3072×1728 943 KB

So I don’t know what to do, if the IC is busted I’ll have to get a new controller(that, I can’t), and if it’s the capacitors, I’m not too confident in removing either of them since they regulate power, I know it can work without them, but I’m not sure if it would actually solve anything.

Would anyone have a suggestion on what to do? I really can’t buy a new one, and I just bought The Surge :weary:

By the way, I’ve never seen a topic like this, so I don’t know if it’s out of place, so feel free to tell me if it’s not OK to have it here.

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Found a thread elsewhere that appear to be messing with the same parts to varied degrees of success. on closer inspection, no they’re not I don’t know this might not be useful at all after all.

There’s some info there that you might be able to work with and see if you can possibly get hold of replacement parts if you’re feeling up to the task of soldering at this level of precision.

Another place talking about the schematics of the PCB here.

The IC you’re talking bout labeled U1 is described here as:

U1 is for when the USB cable is attached, it takes the 5v and knocks it down to ~3v for the other two circuits.

So with that one burnt and you running on USB power it’s no doubt it’s not working. I’m not sure how sensitive this really is and if it’s possible at all to find replacement ICs. But if scaling the power down is all it really does then finding any IC that does the same thing should work as a replacement.

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Thank you so much!!! :heart_eyes:

Even the first link was more than enough (since I found the second one in there), I’ve been reading all that since you posted it, so really, thank you.

I know where to get those IC’s but it’s gonna take like a month or two for them to get here, not to mention I have to buy them in bulk but whatever, but now I can try some things, see if it works, at least while I wait for those parts, thank you very much.

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So I am an electronics engineer though I haven’t done much in it for a while. Too be honest there is not much I can add. The acid mod link shows that that chip is for regulation from 5v to 3v so basically its there to help power the rest of the circuits from the USB cable which would make sense why its heating up when you plugged the cable in and why there is not any power going to it. Melted plastic on the chip is not a great sign and generally means the chip is damaged, but you may be lucky as it don’t seems too bad, but I would not be hopeful. If you really wanted to test it you could plug the cable in with the controller open and if you have a multimeter you could measure the test points for the voltages shown in the acidmod link and see if there is any power at those points (though I don’t think it will help you too much). You could find a replacement chip as you have said but you have to make sure it has the same pin out or else it will not work. Also some regulator chips require or recommend some external circuitry to work so it would need to use the same sort of setup to work, so just keep that in mind.
As for replacing those components that would be a difficult venture, unless you can find somewhere that tells you the exact components in the circuit its not really going to work to well. You could take a guess at what values the capacitors are but they come in standard packages and range wildly in value, so unless you know what it is (and with this size capacitor they are not usually written on the component) you are in the dark and putting something random in there will likely not work. On top of this unless you know what you are doing with soldering surface mount soldering is a pain in the butt (even if you know what you are doing it’s a pain) and people who are inexperienced will likely damage the board when trying to remove the component or soldering one back on. I can explain this more if you like but put simply irreversible damage can be done if you don’t know what you are doing and usually you use more that just a standard soldering iron with a normal tip to get that sort of job done easier.

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Is your warranty expired?

Microsoft is incredibly complaisant if hardware malfunctions during warranty. So much so that I got a free controller simply by telling them my headset didn’t work anymore with a specific controller, which was a little trick, since they would immediately say it’s the controller that doesn’t work anymore and you get a new one free of charge.
And I’ve got Forza 2 for free as compensation for… something, can’t remember. Basically back then support was really easy to exploit, but uh… No, what I meant was that support is super helpful! At least around 2010 in the Xbox 360 days, don’t know if it changed. If you have warranty, call 'em. Unless you’ve already opened the controller.

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They kinda had to be a little nice. Xbox systems were failing left and right before the S finally released.

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@DownwardConcept It is, or rater, I never had one, I bought a refurbished one, those come without one, but I had it for so long that it would have expired by now anyway, and I already opened the controller, so there’s that too.

@PeteMcc Figures, the sentient turret is an engenner :roll_eyes:… :smile:

I’ve dealt with SMD’s from time to time, my DS its been a constant source of practice, I even have a soldering iron made out of two thin pins that heat up when they touch the surface, regardless, the problem seems to be a bit more complicated, as I have noticed other parts of the board heating up to different degrees when plugged in, the buck still being the one that heats the most thou.

So I decided to re-route the power to make it think is using batteries, since those are two different circuits I decided to test it et voila, the bastard works like nothing happened, so all I have to do now is to reduce the 5v from to USB to the 3v that the batteries would provide.

Curiously enough, the cable I use does provide 5v, but for some reason the current leaving right at the port measures 3.3~v, and I can’t figure out why.

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